David Arthur, on Oct 29 2005, 07:28 PM, said:
It goes back to the days when computers were controlling actual, physical teletypewriting machines; LF (ASCII 10) made the typewriter move to the next line, and CR (ASCII 13) moved the head back to the left side of the page.
Once this sort of technology disappeared, a number of people noticed that, since computers were smart enough to combine the two operations, the only difference having two characters made was that every line break took up two bytes rather than one (a big deal in those days ). The problem was, which one should go? Apple kept CR, UNIX kept LF, and Microsoft didn't bother dropping either of them, so that's where the problem comes from.
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In fact it did not always have to involve computers (this is the sixties... the Jurassic of computers, the dinosaurs having not yet disappeared ) - remember ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the telewriters did directly communicate with these codes. And if you have a closer look at the first 32 chars, the control chars, you can see quaint old stuff such as ACKnowledge, Negative AcKnowledge, etc... In fact, you could very well underline whole words by having them typed, then order some backspaces to go back a little, then some underscores; the same way, you could concievably do the accented chars by adding the accent afterwards the same way (check: the tilde, grave and circumflex accents are there; it was thought the single quote could be used as the acute accent as well).
(By the way, it is quite indicative of a strong MS mindset, that they usually don't like dropping old, obsolete, outdated stuff...)
If AppleWorks (or ClarisWorks before it) has been consistently bundled with not high-end Macs in the last OS9 years, and since we can reasonably expect high-end Macs to have been equipped with either AppleWorks or MS Word (or both) by their owners... I don't think that leaves out a significant portion of people; on top of that, we don't have to worry about too old computers since Nova usually doesn't run too well on PowerPC procs before the G3 (I didn't actually try on stuff such as the Power Mac 9600/350, the fastest pre-G3 Mac, but I remember trying it on not much slower stuff and it didn't run at an acceptable speed). So let's run that poll and check the results.